Business Research Methods

Emma Bell is Professor of Organisation Studies at the Open University, UK. Her research explores culture, belief, and materiality in organizations using qualitative methods of inquiry and has been published in journals including Organization Studies, Human Relations, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Organization, Management Learning and the British Journal of Management. Emma is currently joint Vice-Chair Research and Publications of the British Academy of Management and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Alan Bryman was Professor of Organizational and Social Research at the University of Leicester from 2005 to 2017. Prior to this he was Professor of Social Research at Loughborough University for thirty-one years. His main research interests were in leadership, especially in higher education, research methods (particularly mixed methods research), and the 'Disneyization' and 'McDonaldization' of modern society. Alan was also the author of the bestselling textbook Bryman's Social Research Methods (Oxford University Press, 2021) as well as contributing to a range of leading journals: he was an extraordinarily well-cited and internationally-renowned social scientist. Bill Harley is Professor of Management in the Department of Management and Marketing at The University of Melbourne. Bill's academic research has been motivated by an abiding interest in the centrality of work to human life. His work has been published in journals including the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Journal of Management Studies, Academy of Management Learning & Education Industrial Relations, and Work Employment and Society. Bill was previously General Editor of Journal of Management Studies and is currently on the editorial boards of the same journal, as well as Academy of Management Learning & Education, Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences and Human Relations. He is Chair of the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.

Part 1 - The research process 1: The nature and process of business research 2: Business research strategies 3: Research designs 4: Planning a research project and developing research questions 5: Getting started: reviewing the literature 6: Ethics in business research 7: Writing up business researchPart 2 - Quantitative research 8: The nature of quantitative research 9: Sampling in quantitative research 10: Structured interviewing 11: Self-completion questionnaires 12: Asking questions 13: Quantitative research using naturally occurring data 14: Secondary analysis and official statistics 15: Quantitative data analysis: descriptive statistics 16: Quantitative analysis: inferential statisticsPart 3 - Qualitative research 17: The nature of qualitative research 18: Sampling in qualitative research 19: Ethnography and participant observation 20: Interviewing in qualitative research 21: Focus groups 22: Language in qualitative research 23: Documentary data 24: Visual qualitative research 25: Qualitative data analysisPart 4 - Mixed methods research 26: Breaking down the quantitative/qualitative divide 27: Mixed methods research: combining quantitative and qualitative research